 So my name is Tom Darenthal. I'll be your host and I want to welcome you. I hope you're continuing to have a very nice summer. I think the summer lasts for one more week, right? Two weeks? And we're going to start as we have in the past by going around and introducing ourselves and we're going to follow that with announcements. We're going to separate announcements and speak out. So if you have something to just announce, it's a quick one or two line thing, please do that first. And then if you have something that we're going to discuss, we'll do that second. So again, my name is Tom Darenthal. I live on Nash Place. I'm part of the steering committee. And we're going to start right. I never am the first one. Zariah, she, her, Sport One City Councilor, I live on. Nick, Dave, and I live on. Sam, Dordi, Colonial Square. And I'm Tim Dordi and I live with Sam on Colonial Square. And I'm Lynn Severance and I live next door in the back yard. We're in your backyard. Richard Hilliard and I'm close to their backyard. I'm Dave Colley. I'm on his next to his backyard, Nash Place and part of the old East End. Hi, I'm Pat Seelen. I live in his house or our house. We share a backyard and I live in a Nash Place on the old East End. I'm Lindsay Carey and I live on Calarco Court. I'm Catherine Vermean. I live on North Street. Kathy Allwell. I live on North Prospect. Karen Long, Henry Street. I think we're supposed to switch to another. Here we go. I saw the boss coming over. Is it my turn? Yeah. Okay. I'm Jake Schumann. I live on Hildre Drive. I'm Fletcher Pratt and I live on Riverside Ave. Joel Colada, 20 Trace Street, Old East End. Samantha Ayotte, 20 Trace Street, Old East End. My name is Grace. I live at the top of North Street. Hi, Scott Rogers. I'm Wissido. Hi, I'm Cindy Cook. I live on East Avenue. I'm Angie Chapel Sokol. I live on 143 North Prospect Street. Specifically, that's where I live. Hi, I'm Jonathan Chapel Sokol. I specifically live with Angie Chapel Sokol and I'm on the steering committee. I'm Carol Livingston. I also live on Calarco Court right next to Lindsay and I'm on the steering committee as well. I'm Sheryl Green and I live in Burlington Co-Housing just off East Avenue. I'm Peter Likowski and I live in the same place, Burlington Co-Housing. All right. Do we have any announcements? Dave? I think everybody probably knows there's been a lot of signs around the neighborhood but there's going to be a public meeting on the Burlington-Winooski Bridge which is next Tuesday, the 19th, and it's going to be at 6 p.m. It's held at the O'Brien Center in Winooski. So folks may know that their funding has been made available through the infrastructure bill for the upgrade on the Winooski Bridge and not only is it for the Winooski Bridge but it's also for the whole intersection of Colchester Ave, Riverside Ave, and Barrett Street. So they're beginning a process. This is going to be a longer process but basically they have to have things under contract by the end of 2026. So what the stage they're at right now is that the concepts that have been put forward in previous planning are going to be put into detailed planning. That's kind of the next step that'll happen over the next year. So I want to let folks know that I'm participating on the Project Advisory Committee. There's a group of 25 people that make that up. Mark from City Council is on that group as well. So I'm happy to chat with anybody about it or if you'd like to have a mailing list for people that might be interested in learning more about it or but certainly you're more than welcome to come out to the first public meeting and that's going to be next year. Thanks, Dave. Other announcements? A couple of things. One is that Ward 1 is having a picnic on October 5th which is a Thursday from 5 to 7 and we're providing food, the usual barbecue stuff, and then if you want to bring some kind of side dish or dessert or something that would be great too. So it'll be up by the barn, pretty low key, just an opportunity to meet your neighbors and sort of catch up and I'll be sending out, we'll be sending out more information soon. The other is that the words that Charlie is in and Charlie is our town meeting TV guy who really keeps us focused and published. His NPA, the awards two and three, have sponsored a zine which is like a graphic novel, a graphic magazine and helped design it. We all chimed in as steering committee members but the purpose of it is and it'll be published and everybody will get a copy and we'll pass them out to people. There's a poster of them that's out in the, I can pass this around. It's basically tells the story of NPAs, what NPAs are, how to get involved, how to, what happens at NPAs and gives you more specific information about your own. So those we'll be sending out to folks and the main person we need to thank for that is Sam, the woman who's in the right-hand corner of the poster, what's her name? The woman who does the graphics. Oh, Christine, who did all the art around the city. Yeah, so that that will be available to you as well and certainly we have a number of those posters so feel free to take those if you're interested. Karen, you hit your hand up? Yeah. Oh, okay. Any other announcements? Do we? Yes. I just wanted to let people know Chase Street got its traffic calming implementation version 1.0 put in to recap. We had a block party where DPW attended and we expressed our desires for traffic calming, picked out some options. They were kind enough to come back with three possibilities for us and we ended up going with the most flexible temporary option, one that can be reconfigured. So signs are up, the somewhat temporary semi-permanent is in place and we'll be looking to tweak it in the coming months or year as we're going forward. So as you probably have noticed, the East Avenue sidewalk is now completed and we're really, really happy about it. So a few of us are getting together to have a celebration with various conveyances, wheelchairs, skateboards, bicycles, whatever you want to bring. It'll be either the 23rd or 24th, much in front porch form. I'll let me know if you want to be involved. We're going to have a bunch of kids, hopefully some trash cans to bang and other band type things and probably start from roughly co-housing or my house, which is in the middle of East Avenue and go down to the end and back. And just to celebrate and to thank DPW for making that arterial passable by people, it has not been passable for years. So that's all. Other announcements? Okay, so as everyone knows, we did redistricting and because of that, people's wards have shifted and so from working in the polling places for the last 20 years or so, I know what is going to happen is that people are going to walk into their usual polling place that they've been voting in for 10 to 40 years and they're going to probably wait in the line just to be told that you're in the wrong location. So I'm basically saying that people should go to the city website and they should go into like the city clerk's office and then look for elections and then eventually look for something called maps, draw up the new map, not the old one, because they're both going to be there. So drop the new map and blow it up until you can see your house and that will tell you what ward you should vote in because I guarantee you, especially in wards two and three, there's going to be 50 to 100 people that walk in there and they're going to be told you're in the wrong polling place, you need to go somewhere else. So I just advise people to check exactly where what their ward is if there's any question. Thank you. Charlie, when's the next election that people will have to go and vote in? So that'll be the first Tuesday in March and then there'll be another one in August and then the big presidential one will happen in November. So there's nothing scheduled for the rest of this year? Right, but everything has to stay the same. So even though I've been moved into ward two, I'm still officially in ward three because there might be a special election like so legally the wards, they're kind of been changed but they're kind of still the same because you don't know if there's going to be a special election. So it depends on when, if there is anything going on in 2023, you're going to go to the old ward but in 2024, you're going to go to the new voting place associated with your new ward. So I think by January, the Secretary of State of Vermont will start changing over because right now if you ask the State of Vermont what ward you live in, if your ward's been changed, they're going to tell you you're in your old ward. So I'm hoping everybody checks what ward they live in like in January but for legal reasons everything is kind of confusing. I don't want to go into it but I just advise people to make sure you know what you're doing when you go to vote. And for right now if you're going to change you can go to whichever NPA you think is better, right? You can always go to any NPA like I'm not from ward one but I'm here so you can go to any NPA meeting that you want so. All right Carol, I mean yeah Carol. Tom is that something maybe we as an NPA could help at our subsequent meetings we have maps and we can try to keep our you know some sense with help from Zariah and Tim. Can you help us with it? I mean we'll have maps so that you can see where you live now and where what ward you're in and then potentially what will change by January. So that's the least we could do is to have something posted every NPA so that you all would have a chance to. I will say we were somewhat lucky because of the people in this room did a lot of advocacy so ward one did not change as much as it had been proposed to change so we were staying it did change yes it had to change because it was the biggest ward but not as much as originally. All right any other announcements in the room? Can the people online hear us? Can you give us a thumbs up if you can hear us? Carter just wrote saying he can't participate. He said he's here and he can't participate. He just got it let in. Oh maybe he's in now. Here but can't seem to participate. All right so we don't. Can people like raise their thumbs up or something or raise their hands if they can hear us? We're on mute though aren't we? I'm on mute but that's just this computer. But yeah that's the whole that's the whole thing. So can you hear us now? Can people online hear us? You just don't have something for that so we don't know. It sounds like they're talking to each other. What are they saying? They formed a new system of work. We also don't have a video yeah on the the little or left hand corner. Right. Well let's go read it for a reason. Oh is it? So can you write in the notes or somewhere? Whether they can at least hear us? Yeah. I'll send them a chat maybe. Yeah. I don't think you need the video. They can't hear us. They cannot. Okay. All right well we're gonna we're gonna move ahead. Just a quick question follow up on that finding the work for people to go forward in. What's the next steps on that? Are we allowed to know? So if you might participate in doing that? We're gonna we're gonna try to bring a map to the next NPA meeting that can describe where the boundaries changed and that'll give people an idea of where what word they're in now and it sounds like the majority of the people are not going to be affected but there will be some. All right we're gonna shift gears and go to speak out and I mean really it's a pretty open mic you can bring up what you want to bring up. Yes. Okay. Oh. Do you care if I can first? Okay. Hi Samantha, 20 Chase Street and I said that already but just in case we yeah. So a couple of us through the oldies son have kind of communicated about this but just to make other people aware there are currently people camped in Shmantska Park and I was fortunate enough to be there the other day when a Burlington Park Ranger was speaking with the people in the tent and he then came up to me because he said I see you're with your dog it seems that you must be using this park a lot so let me just give you a little rundown and so I shared that with people the oldies son but I wanted to share it with you all as well and so the couple living in the tent I do have their names their names are John and Lisa they are a couple they also have a dog and they are not IV drug users and they are working with a social worker to reintegrate into society and the Ranger believes that they are looking for work they are very polite and are currently in transition the Ranger also let me know that he gave them until tomorrow because of the rain and everything tonight to kind of stick around and figure out what they're doing because he gave me insight that while I think there was a lot of misconception with the hotel vouchers being finished and a lot of unhoused people camping in a lot of the public parks and whether or not that's legal or legal he told me that it is illegal they are not supposed to be camping in the parks however in situations like this where we are fortunate enough that this is a very kind couple they are in a transitional period in their lives it is kind of a moral duty of us and especially the Ranger it's kind of a sticky situation to tiptoe around but in order for them to make contact with a social worker it's best that they have a place to stay for at least a couple of days so that a social worker will know where to find them and I know that it can be very scary to be going into our public parks and not know of you know the situations that are going on but because of that if you are at all worried I talked to the Ranger and he said one of the best things that we can do is to see click fix the location of a tent and so that the Rangers know where they can show up and who they can talk to so that they can give these people intense the unhoused people a couple of days and just have a conversation with them and figure out what their situation is so the C clicks fix helps a lot and then he also told me that contacting the Howard Street Center they have a lot of resources for people to use and that's a really positive place for them to seek out resources and then he also said let me see what else he said yeah I think the biggest takeaway from that was that it's a very sensitive situation and these people in order to continue to get the help that they need it would behoove us to at least contact the Rangers but then have the Rangers have a conversation with them so that they can still continue to get help and just pushing people around from place to place to place doesn't help them so allowing them to find resources that they need I think is a really important thing and I have the name and contact for the Ranger his name is Neil Preston and you can find him on I think the park's website but if anybody wants to write it down his email is n Preston p-r-e-s-t-o-n at Burlington VT.gov and he was extremely polite he was very caring about the situation and he knows that it is a very difficult situation to work around but if you ever have any concerns he said that his email is always open his line is always open so give him a call and yeah if anybody has questions let me know and let Neil know but from what he told me it is a very respectable couple who is there who is just at a having a very difficult time right now I have more of a question I'm wondering if and when we're going to hear about the pipeline going from the community heat yeah the one going to the uvm hospital it's going to go up prospect and we have someone here who can talk about that okay and and are we going to have any say about that or any feed any is that going to come into a conversation hi is that is that working hi I'm Darren Springer for anyone I haven't met general manager Burlington electric department came over we just had our electric commission meeting so I was hoping to be here a little earlier so thanks for the question because that's what I was here to talk about a little bit is the district heat proposal I wanted to let everyone know that we have some resources on our website BurlingtonElectric.com slash McNeil we had a webinar just yesterday with three communities elsewhere St. Paul Minnesota Lund Sweden and Halifax in Canada looking at how they're using biomass district energy systems in their communities that recording is on our website as well as some q and a documents and some other reports and I'd be glad to do a more in-depth presentation but our goal has been to be able to figure out once and for all sort of does this project work for the community financially in terms of our goals in terms of our energy goals and we've been working really hard with the potential customers like the hospital with our partner evergreen energy which is out of Minnesota and they have been involved in the St. Paul system for example and what we have is is essentially a designed and engineered project for the first time in the history of this discussion that is actionable but we are waiting to to learn more in terms of does this make sense economically for all involved and if it does our hope is to bring it forward to the community through our electric commission to the city council for consideration so to answer your question very specifically if it does move forward we anticipate having one or more work sessions at the city council to fully describe the project and the parameters of it for the community and for policymakers prior to it you know moving forward in any respect so there will be some additional process if there are any specific questions that I can answer and if it's appropriate at this time I'm happy to but if not I at least wanted to say hello I haven't been toward one mpa maybe and it seems like it's been either six months or a year I can't remember last time but glad to be with you all happy to answer questions and wanted to share the reference for our website yes so tentatively we're hoping to talk with the council in October very soon we've been well soon in the context of a 40-year project right but yes did you have a question or concern my concern is that all the streets are going to be ripped up and the pipeline going through and it's supposed to go right through where I live and that's the disruption that's my concern no and also we've had previous conversations about biomass energy and it's clean it being clean or dirty yes thank you great in terms of the streets it's true there would be a street project to get a steam pipe up from the McNeil plant up to the hospital potentially some uvm buildings if they join in and then we would have a condensate loop that would return that could potentially connect to other buildings or the intervail center or others so there would be during a limited period of time there would be construction for the project so that's that's a fair concern I understand that we're trying to coordinate as best we can with dpw for any other work that might be taking place but the timeline for the project may or may not line up with that so in terms of in terms of biomass you know generally we've done a lot of work on this subject there's a lot of the reports on our website related to this topic the thing I would say I would say two things just briefly one is if you look at the types of wood that we're using which is really primarily residues that are left over from other higher value logging operations that's about 88 and a half percent of our wood is coming from wood chips that are from higher value operations where the residue is left over that would otherwise potentially decompose and emit carbon either way as well as we get about 10% from sawmill residue and other mill residues that's left over wastewood product and one and a half percent roughly from the wastewood yard that folks can you know bring their clean untreated wood so our wood profile is about as favorable as you'll see in terms of having a carbon payback that's favorable compared to the alternatives natural gas coal other things for electric generation and McNeill runs 92 to 98 percent of the time the alternative fuel on the new england grid is natural gas so McNeill really is helping to displace fossil fuel when it's running and if the project moves forward it would displace about 16 percent of the natural gas that we use in burlington in the commercial sector so it's a really significant opportunity in terms of our goals from a climate standpoint and otherwise to displace fossil fuels using renewable fuels and using essentially a wastewood product that we are already processing anyway with McNeill but be able to use that plant more efficiently to benefit the community so that's why we're pursuing the project well i mean there would be a construction period that would be taking place if the project was approved and if it moved forward there's a contemplated construction period you know of between a year and two years now the streets aren't going to be disrupted that entire time that would be for the entire project going from McNeill all the way up to the hospital all the engineering that would go into that it's a couple miles two miles yeah yep so any chance that we could get you to come to another MBA meeting so we could have more discussion because i think it's going to affect a lot of people in this room yeah in the world no absolutely i mean first we have to see if the project's going to move forward obviously but i would also offer that we could have evergreen energy join us on zoom and they've been the engineers designing and working on the project and we could go more in depth on the construction period what it would look like exactly where the route is what you might be able to expect if the project's moving forward i'd certainly be interested to do that yeah i've heard that there's going to be a lot more natural gas used by you folks to get it up to the and i want to see exactly a tell us how much natural gas you use right now because you do use natural gas to augment what you're doing with the wood and how much more you're going to need to use to get this stuff up to the hospital the university or wherever it's supposed to go so we do not generate electricity with natural gas we generate electricity exclusively with wood chips the plant operations the ancillary operations can use some natural gas and we've quantified that in our reports we've looked at all the different plant operations and any fossil fuels that it requires to get wood chips to the plant so we have reports that look at that from an emissions standpoint but i think it's a misconception because the plant is capable of generating electricity with natural gas but we don't do that we haven't done it in over 10 years and you're going to swear to us that you're not going to i this this general manager of burlington electric will never sign off on generating electricity with natural gas we're a wood chip plant we're renewable i'm committed to that you've got my word on that well you got my word on that another question i have a question i understand that a good piece of the economic feasibility of this depends on selling carbon credits in other words to get money from other corporations around the world who can pace it basically pollute and pay us for or subsidize our supposedly green electricity generation could you elaborate on that please the carbon credit issue sure so district energy is not going to be about selling carbon credits but i think you're talking about renewable energy credits with mcneil so mcneil as a renewable plant and this is true for solar for wind for hydropower any renewable energy facility that's connected in the new england grid creates renewable energy credits when it generates power and what we do under vermont law is we both buy and sell renewable energy credits to keep your rates as low as we can keep them so we sell some mcneil credits but we also buy back renewable credits that may be less expensive to make sure that every megawatt hour of electricity that's used by the people of burlington is covered with renewable energy production in the new england system so i think that's what you're getting at those credits are all used within the new england grid and we're connected to the new england grid and that's really it's it's not a carbon credit system and it's not like an offset that's being sold somewhere else in the world it's really a way that we account for renewable electricity in the new england system because you can't track an electron once it's on the grid you don't know where it's going from a physical standpoint so these credits are created for every megawatt hour that you generate so that each utility can comply with its state's renewable portfolio standards essentially effectively and where possible if we can do so we buy and sell credits to be able to keep rates lower than they otherwise would be but we are 100 renewable both before and after we sell credits and buy them back so this is not an offset there is no offset happening here correct there are no carbon offsets being sold we're not selling carbon offsets no okay i'm glad to hear that yep can we table this and move on a little bit we're a little bit behind schedule and maybe what we need is a separate meeting to further discuss this would that be would people we actually do have a discussion item later about up topics for our meetings later in the year maybe we should make this one of those topics is this coming to the council october 7th or october 14th i think the first work section tentatively i want to say october 10th sorry if i'm remembering correctly yeah first work session yeah i do i don't i don't know when i think that might be before we have an npa again so i wonder if it actually would be worth taking some of the time today to continue to talk about this and instead of because i think a lot of the questions that we have are more for darin than they are for the some of the specialists i think it might be worth cutting into our time darin so yeah i came to speak about this because i did attend the seminar that was announced in south union front porch forum on monday the 10th the seminar was tuesday the 11th at 11 o'clock which is not a very convenient time for most people 42 people were there out of the whole city i think it was announced in our npa i mean our front porch forum one east but i never saw it but there were three people as you said that spoke about it there was nobody there were no like there was no well-rounded you know thing about information there were three people that have biomass plants the one in Nova Scotia spoke about their 30 year old plant that had a crack in the casing and they had to shut it down for a year now we have a 40 year old plant which has been my concern for investing 40 million dollars to tear up two miles of our street what is that going to do in our carbon footprint to dig up our roads and re ask for them and the other person that spoke from st paul their plant is one block from city hall and one block from the stadium and they heat and cool the city with it and they only use urban tree waste now we are trucking which is using gasoline we aren't using electric trucks to bring in all this stuff so it's very different what we're looking at in burlington and the last guy was from sweden as you said and it seems like they have the newest and the cleanest biomass operation but from what i read we are polluting what far more our air by using by burning you the so-called waste we could use that and particle board it could be used in insulation but instead we're burning it and we are sending those particles in our air and i think the cost is exorbitant 40 million to go two miles and destroy our streets i mean two years is a long time for people to live with that construction so glad to respond to some of that if i can um we did send out to our we have an email list for burlington electric customers so we sent out the webinar information there we posted on social media we did send it out on from porch forum so we did everything we could to get the word out i appreciate if it didn't get to you in time monday the bit excuse me but monday the day before the event is not enough time 42 people in the whole city were there well just and to be fair um we have posted in our website so folks can watch it and it was you know it we had a forum um back in june that the tuc committee of the city council held that had a number of skeptical folks as part of the panel and our goal with yesterday's webinar was really just to find out from other communities that have a plant like we do and are trying to use it in the way that we're proposing to use it what their experience is um i didn't know any of them before the webinar we kind of you know learned about them uh through connecting with the international district energy association and i hope that their experience was valuable to share with the community if it if you didn't feel like it was i apologize for that but um we were just trying to get information out and certainly in the chat there were a number of folks asking skeptical questions and moderator brought those to the fore um well i think she tried to answer you know get as many answers we could in our period now in terms of mcneal so in terms of air emissions um we've installed as i think folks may know uh equipment so that the nox emissions at mcneal are well below state and federal standards the particulate emissions at mcneal i think are one tenth of the state standard and one one hundredth of the federal standard and in terms of carbon as i mentioned uh you know we have quantified those different emissions in terms of bringing wood to the plant 75 percent of our wood arrives by rail from the swanton woodyard only 25 percent comes by truck that's part of our permit condition so most of the wood is coming in by rail we have quantified all those emissions they're on reports on our website i submit to you that based on the reviews that we've done that using renewable local wood at mcneal has a far better carbon footprint for our community than using imported natural gas or any other fossil fuel wood and we have data that that shows that i understand not everyone looks at it that way that's that's okay district energy isn't even really about that discussion per se it's really about what you were getting at we have a 40 year old plant there's nothing inherent about a 40 year old plant says you can't continue to operate and i in fact think we're going to need it uh for another 20 years because we have a reliability need uh we need to be able to have a balance between solar wind hydro and wood uh mcneal runs when we need it it's the only renewable plant we have that we can say hey we need power now prices are high we don't want to be hit by those as a part of the new england system we're going to run mcneal i can't do that with solar i can't do it with wind and i can't do it with hydro and until we have a grid that's far more renewable than we do today i believe having mcneal has a lot of benefits for us so the question we have is is it worth uh making an investment and to be clear it's not an investment by burlington taxpayers it's an investment that would be made by a non-profit issuing bonds that would be paid back through the sale of the thermal energy to the customers so this is not a taxpayer finance project um very very different setup so hopefully that's helpful in some context but i appreciate i hear your concern i appreciate it thanks i think that's a good segue into my question which is actually a different kind of thing but it's related um i'm i'm curious about that long term vision of the burlington electric department um and the conversations i imagine the electric like commission has been having um i was just at a meeting about the frame and i had to leave a few minutes early to come here um and they were talking about master planning like for the northern waterfront and i'm glad you're here because i didn't have the opportunity there to ask the the the two gas fired turbines down there that you know we run for an hour every year just to test them right that's like the one piece of the the waterfront that's like not you know enjoyable by the community do you or what's what's the conversations that's happening around that um and then actually before you answer that i'm just going to say to the room like we have very skilled agro forestry scientists at uvm um it might be a good idea to invite some of those folks to come and participate in this conversation give us an unbiased scientific opinion so are you looking for an answer now or are you saying yeah i'm here another conversation i'm saying this conversation that we've been having yeah let's have another conversation and bring in some people with some good knowledge that can educate us but right now i'm curious to ask while i have the opportunity is there any plan for the gas powered turbines down at the waterfront by the frame to move them somewhere so that we can have that waterfront so i'm not aware of any plan or how costly it would be to move the gas turbines off the waterfront we are actively exploring whether we can convert them uh to run on something like biodiesel from restaurant oil so that's part of what we're planning uh relative to kind of their footprint um but no i don't know that there'd be anywhere we could move them very easily uh they run as you mentioned almost never but they provide a really important reliability revenue stream for our customers so uh yeah appreciate the dialogue there but uh no no immediate plan to move that i i would like to thank you for um offering up an example of inviting people who are running these plants elsewhere in the country and elsewhere in the world so that we can learn from them because there's a lot to learn sure that we can't know so i for one just want to thank you for the foresight and gathering information from others thank you appreciate it yeah i just wanted um my concern is is that digging up what's going to happen in the streets and i happen to live in an area that i know it's going to go through i was already told it's going to go right in front of my house okay but i live in an area where there is a lot of construction because the sewer system and everything else a ton of construction right i mean um you know north prospect was a mess for so long and i what's going to happen with i mean would you like i mean if you'd like i'd love to take your contact information and i can connect you with the engineering team that's working on it and we can get you more detail ahead of a future meeting or i'd be happy to have you know folks provide more information in that meeting i'm not i just want to be clear i'm not the engineer who designed the project so i don't want to speak to it in greater detail than i should i very much understand the concern i live in burlington um you know i see the construction obviously in various parts of the city i know in some cases it can be slower or more frustrating and create impact so i don't want to diminish that in any way i totally appreciate what you're saying i'd be happy to follow up if you'd like to share contact info we got we're going to shift the people online can can i be heard online Sharon Sharon you have something you want to say we cannot hear you yeah Sharon speak and i'll read out your captions Sharon we can't hear you but if you speak there's uh captions that are coming up on the screen so i'll just read those aloud i think um you know i apologize to the people online we're having some technical difficulties and we'll have them resolved by the next meeting but uh i think uh you're sort of s l l for today so are are we done with this conversation for today is it possible to not be done with speak out because we've had two you know one issue and one comment on another issue could we have some speak yes that's all yes one question for gara you mentioned no no no we got a we we have to move on it's just a quick question yes or no answer okay looking at the economic viability of the project what's the probability that it's going to pass you asked for a yes or no answer i i think we've designed a really economically uh feasible version of this project i don't want to you know i wouldn't put a probability on it but you we're all going to know very soon and our hope is is if we do bring it to the council on the 10th it's because we have a version of this that's penciling for the folks uh for for the folks in the city for the medical center and for everybody else involved so stay tuned we'll we'll be there hopefully in the near future and just thank you very much issues who has a different issue actually it's not an issue it's a celebration that um a bunch of uh npa folk got together when in june uh and planted there's a kind of barren area at the at the intersection of uh cultures your avenue and east avenue so we were coming we were talking about doable projects we could do to improve the the livability of uh ward one and a bunch of us got together we got mostly donated plants uh carol bought a bunch of stuff uh mulch and not mulch but fertilizer and other stuff and joel and and sam helped out emily helped out a bunch of folks somebody donated some stone to make the pathway and if you haven't checked it out yet look at the underneath the flagpole the corner of east avenue and colchester avenue it's it's really transformed that area we're hoping to get uvm to let us paint the flagpole it seems unlikely but but that would be a nice touch for the winter we think it's some color there uh but but a shout out to everybody who helped and there'll be another project on triangle park and help me with a date somebody um october early october right and triangle park is at the intersection of chase and barrett yeah so um everybody's welcome to to come on out contact who should they contact can they contact to use sam or joeler okay carol okay great and we're just really happy and we're hoping that we can come up with other projects like that around the ward because it only really took a it took a bunch of organizing but then just a morning of real hard work to get it in so it was fun yeah yeah other other issues for speak out yes yeah thank you i sam i want to just i just want to mention a uh another incident that happened which was kind it had a different outcome and and i think we got to consider this all in whole i really appreciate what you said because it's really important um my my daughter and son-in-law were visiting over labor day weekend and with their two-year-old child and my son-in-law and little elliott went down to the homeroid park playground and they were playing and these are two of the quietest people i know and they were playing and they were playing on the slide or something and um somebody somebody got up they were outside the playground part but they got up and started yelling at my son-in-law and my two-year-old child telling them that they should die for having woken him up um and that's the unfortunate side of this i don't think the park ranger would have said all those things about this person i think this person was really troubled yes but i don't i also don't think that my two-year-old needs to hear that he should die from somebody when he's playing in a playground so it's a it's a problem and we have to work the whole thing out yeah three days later somebody did see click fix pomeroy park so i assume somebody else was was a had a had a problem and they did that yeah it's it's an unfortunate situation and um jill and i've talked about it it's just this um always questioning morals of our comfortability versus people not being privileged enough even to have a warm shower and warm food and um to be going through the things that they're going through um it's it is very difficult and uh troubling um i think it's always i think always the first step in my opinion is to always kind of show grace and love first um it's very difficult when people are telling you that you should die for for uh waking them up um but um one kind of second to that sort of one other thing that the ranger said was one way that he finds safety in going and interacting with any of these people is with food and that sparks a very positive string in my heart um and it's just food always food is a really great icebreaker it's something to keep people warm and full and feel safe and um it's uh not going to say that it's going to solve the world's problems but um it's yeah it's a very unfortunate situation um i know that there's other people who have said that they've found needles near their yards and that's a very frightening thing to experience um i think no matter what reach out to the rangers and c-click fix anything that you see and um just show grace even though it's really difficult sometimes they just ran away that's what they i mean there's a two-year-old kid you know it's no confrontation no food yeah i just want to continue with that i also have met neil and had just a wonderful conversation with him and de-escalation is part of the training that they have and so i'm just trying to imagine if there was a person who was trained in de-escalation in that particular situation how they might have responded or how they might have you know brought those three people to be able to look each other in the eye um and i'm actually wondering if just in this moment if it makes sense for us even as an npa to have some something happen in terms of de-escalation training and i think the more people that have that as part of their toolkit um you know we'd know how to respond in those situations a little more carefully and i think part of what neil's doing i mean i know if he had been there there would have been a conversation and those three people would have looked each other in the eye by the end of it so maybe we need beat park rangers we need what park rangers on the beat rather than on call maybe they should be they should be destroying the city and enjoying the park yeah rather than having to secretly fix something which is a five or six day but i got i can i make a comment um we can move on i'm no i i have just a comment relative to this and that's you know it sounds like waking up is a big issue all right i was on church street um well it was almost dark this morning and people who don't have housing are waking up all right the trucks are in to service the restaurants and stuff they're they're on church street pretty early and um so people are active right then and so maybe getting rangers to be and parks maybe a good time to have them there is when people wake up yeah i i like the point of it maybe not everybody in the npa word has to get training but i think it relieves a lot of pressure off of the city who is already having difficulty finding people to fill jobs for all different departments i think it's a good tool for everybody to have and um whether or not you'll use it or you'll feel comfortable using it is one thing but i think it's um instead of relying on a specific department and waiting and calling them even having just like the first steps i think could be a positive thing for more people in the community to have and chocolate thunder security who we see mikey van gulden and his team feel like we're seeing them everywhere um you know that's another example of just excellent excellent de-escalation i mean i consider mikey to be one of the most valuable players in the city period yeah and look at it how many of us know do we have other uh contributors to this right there i got preoccupied with c click fix um i really love that idea of us having some what did you call it into de-escalation training just as i mean i just think yeah i love that idea all right and um any other speak out issues seeing none we're going to move forward to the next item which is city council updates and are gary and akira here no gary's not here right no so we have bought a little bit of time would you like me to come up yeah do you want to replace by tim you're gonna replace me okay not that works not kicking you out but usually you're on the other side of me oh it's weird you want to go first sure um we haven't had a meeting in a while but we also don't have that much time so i won't try to do it i do think we're kind of using the two items maybe is that right tom yes yes um well i'll start on some of the housing stuff just so that we can move to the public safety stuff um and i started a presentation but i didn't send it to anyone so i will just link it in the front porch forum notes afterwards but i just want to do two things because a few things a few people brought up before the meeting the short term rentals and the lawsuit and so tim and i didn't touch base but we were on the same email chain um and at least one instance so um i think we're both supportive of the current current short term rental ordinance um i had a big part in deciding what what it was so i'm definitely supportive of it and what it is right now just so people know is you can basically rent in your rent as long as you live on the property is like the short form of like what we're allowed to do now um and there's a lawsuit out saying that the city can't regulate it this way i'm pretty i'm not a lawyer jim can speak to it um i i'm pretty sure it's not i don't think that lawsuit's going to go very far just because the city was already regulating them as bed and breakfast before then and that had the same kind of standard of you needed to live in a whole bunch of other standards actually that air bbs don't have so um i don't think that's going to go anywhere i think our short term rental compliance is going to stay um as is but that's just my quick thought on it because it was in the news anything to add um i i have not read the legal filing so i don't have an opinion on the strength of the lawsuit but zurai is right um i agree with the policy um as it exists so i hope i hope but i hope we have a strong legal basis for it and then um some other things just because we haven't met in a while south and rezoning pass that doesn't affect us quite as much here in the east end but um it passed it does allow up to eight floors as recommended by the planning office we did change it so that um the view below callahan park can only be up to six feet as opposed to up to eight feet to try to preserve those views at the top of callahan stories yeah days a feat um stories not feet um and then also and i think that this just highlights the importance of public process and not um even though it can be frustrating pushing things to through too quickly i was talking to someone and we realized last minute that the south end allowed that part of the south end allows offsite or payment in lose for affordable housing which is kind of the last um like ways that we really have to still have affordable housing i feel like a lot of folks who are living in burlington um who aren't well off are using our inclusionary zoning ordinance that was put in place back when airheart was counselor maybe um and so i was really grateful to ben and sarah from the south and north end respectively um who got behind a last minute amendment of mine which wasn't that elegant and the mayor didn't love but um decided not to oppose to not allow payment in lieu um or offsite um around it and i do hope i just also a little bit of foresight i think that was one of the we weakened the inclusionary zoning a lot in 2019 that's actually one of the reasons i ran and so i think that was the one that we really messed up on and that we shouldn't allow that was one of the tenants and so i'm hoping that ben sarah and i and others but we're on the ordinance committee can work together to change that at all because the south end didn't qualify because it has low quality or like low income housing but that's because there's no housing there right now um because it's not zoned for that um so it would have been a real travesty to have this new kind of high income neighborhood bubble up and not have um any inclusionary zoning housing in it especially because the in lieu payments are 35 to 70 thousand dollars per unit which doesn't buy you anything anywhere in vermont much less burlington um and then the next thing that's coming up is full city rezoning which is feels like every year we've gotten even bigger like first we had short term rentals then we had south end rezoning now we're gonna have full city rezoning which we're calling middle housing rezoning so that's going to be a big thing that they're trying to push pretty quickly to get it on the ballot in march i believe wait are we doing ballot i don't know ignore what i just said i think i just misspoke but we're trying to push it through pretty quickly but again i think it's worth taking the time making sure we're not making a lot mistakes just because of how big of a deal this will be and how much it will affect every single part of burlington but i am excited to see this pass it's going to be a lot of infill some of it is state mandated so the state now says you cannot have you single family ordinance housing you have to allow things like duplexes everywhere in your city so i think those changes are excited and hopefully helping us welcome more neighbors into burlington yeah and in terms of public engagement monday uh we had megan tuttle um from the office of city planning and her uh staff put on a what i thought was a really good presentation that sort of laid the roadmap forward in terms of the meetings that we're going to have so to the extent that you are interested in in this issue i definitely recommend that and i recommend people being really really engaged as this process goes forward and i think it might be worth to have one of those i know that we've got the npa meetings but i think they're always so so many topics to cover so having either one off topic like to just focus on rezoning because i think it's complicated enough and a big enough deal to spend a whole hour and a half on so sarah morgan is scheduled to come in october because she's the one who's sort of leading out on the rezoning um so she's she's setting aside i think we're setting aside 30 minutes on our october meeting so are you compromise that just forego your report it's also just really interesting from and i was completely ignorant of all this from just from a historical perspective how we ended up with what they call the sort of this missing this missing middle and how from a policy perspective we ended up where we are um so yeah and we're not that's not unique to burlington that's a problem all across america so we've got lots of lesson learned lessons learned from places all over the u.s. on fixing our problematic zoning any other updates that you want to give to him so you touched on the sc id which i wanted to talk about we've already discussed the mcneal plant and there's more to come on that um you know the neighborhood code issue curiosity where are you on the mcneal plant undecided i'm also undecided genuinely undecided so there are obviously people on the city council and otherwise that are firmly in favor of this i think fair to say i don't know that's why i asked i actually don't know where people are seems like there are people um and then there are obviously folks who are clearly opposed including folks in this room um i am undecided harder wrote a very good thing in there for you to read later about the emissions from the mcneal plant i think but and children and their health so i have a question i have written you both about short-term rental and i'm glad to hear you support you know that these people with the lawsuit are pretty out of line it seems but my concerns i've lived here so long and i know that we've had ordinances um zoning about lot coverage that should be a parking lot and should be a green permeable soil and we've also had laws about single family homes turned into uh group quarters and since you know 1997 when i've been involved trying to get the city to do something i was pretty unsuccessful there's a lot of things that have never been enforced so many of our neighborhoods are they've been taken over totally i mean in some time you know they've been sometimes at places are called student ghettos which is really horrible but i feel like with short-term rentals we're going to run into the same thing people are going to be driven out of their neighborhoods like people were driven out of their neighborhoods before because investors are buying properties especially like on lake uterus and they're renting them for exorbitant they're not living there at all they are taking whole houses and renting them out for large sums of money per night and the people that live there don't want that and now this lawsuit is happening which one of the people that bought the houses he's like a big driver on this lawsuit so if we can as a city you know it's just supporting our neighborhoods just like we did not support lori lumas or union or any of those places that i know families that were driven out because of the student population just taking over i hate excuse me i hate to see that happen in more of our neighborhoods and driving at our families that come to the meetings and you know people that are guests should be in our hotels not take on over our houses so anyway we'll all be about enforcement i mean this is one of the impotences behind the the short-term rental ordinance i mean this is what i think deris was aiming to protect the lord announced they've never given a fine and we know there are people it was supposed to start in may that it was going to be enforced this is the end of mid of september and no one has been fined they are still renting out their whole houses i i do have to get an update on that i do think and i understand why you're so frustrated with enforcement i hope my hope is that because this is like large part like online and paper enforcement right it's like a website is telling us what places are out of compliance we can just send a notice of like being out of compliance it's not as much of the although i understand that that's you've done a lot of the documentation that's like you but that would otherwise be like difficult or like more work to do but i also i haven't gotten an update i have to admit from unlike what enforcement we have started doing but i assume the lawsuit is coming because we started doing that enforcement it is my is my assumption of why it's waited this long um until for them to do it but i i will find out and get back to you on that great thanks just quickly to follow up on that i mean i um i totally support what karen saying what i read was bill said that he wasn't enforcing because of the lawsuit i may be misremembering that but it just struck me is you know was quoted in the paper so maybe you know the reporting is not always 100 percent but um it just struck me is really weird too because i was under the impression that he had said he's not enforcing because of the suit which makes no sense to me i will check on that as well i have decided to assume that he wasn't enforcing on those people because of once they've been issued whatever but i will find out and i think one other thing that you know obviously the city is going to have to defend the suit as vigorously as as possible but you know one of the things to look at is it does look like the fine is not very substantial given the amount of income that people are making off of air b&b's i mean people could just take the fine pay it and they'll still make a lot a lot of money yeah i i might have to check i think because it's an ongoing fine you can get fine for every day that there's a violation so it's not a one time two hundred dollar whatever it was but um yeah but other cities triple what they collect say you're charging six hundred dollars you're fine then is 1800 and in places that have you know tried to crack down right because to some extent if you do have one of the really big lake houses you can make significantly more than 200 dollars a night yeah okay i'll look into that um do we want to shift gears and talk about public safety public safety right that's not you that's me um which i care about it right but you weren't asked to prepare something to because we thought you weren't going to be here um which you can add all of your thoughts i'm just going to go through some stats and i will say um there's i didn't get i didn't get to all the topics so there's three topics we can start on so there's nothing on graffiti which i know we've talked about in the past i didn't get an update on that um is there any yes can you sort of describe how you're going to frame this or you know how we start thinking about it before you go into the details yeah so i i am going to just give updates on what has happened on four topics which is houselessness nope three topics houselessness opioids and police response and then folks can ask some questions if they have them or discuss and then i know that you all have a plan for working groups or something like that i don't know if that's carter or somebody in the room well we were hoping to hear i mean you're sort of introducing mic the background information for us and then from there we would figure out panels to try to those in depth in depth great um so i think we could talk about what some of the other things are but for me the biggest one as you'll probably know is houselessness which else is that okay tom to do it in that way um so as of may 2023 and i apologize that i don't have this up on screen but i will share it on front porch forum okay it's not pretty but i can share it oh i have a you should just proceed and talk okay sorry i will follow up with notes on front porch forum um as of may 2023 there were 633 households experiencing homelessness in shannon county we haven't really done updates since then because most of the people who work on this have just been scrambling to help people who were who were exited out of the motel program um we know that there's over 200 people who are unsheltered in burlington right now there's a waiting list of over 150 people for the is it elwood housing starts with an e-housing the pods elwood pods and the shelters are full and even just the usual baseline leads so not like housing but things like supplies to people is much more stretched now than it was pre-pandemic just given some of the volume um i do want to say just because i think there's some rumors flying around the vast majority of people experiencing homelessness in vermont and in shannon county and in burlington are vermonters they are not from out of state there is not people moving here to be homeless here um the um burlington requested to convert the state office buildings into 50 to 75 bed homeless shelter that was not approved by the state so that's not coming um and then the Champlain Inn um a new place shut down it didn't shut down but was in the process of shutting down and cvoeo has taken over management um so that that can continue to be a facility for our neighborhoods so i have nothing but bad news on that i'm sorry there's going to be a lot of bad news um there's not a lot of plans in the works um honestly there's both a lack of funding which is what happened with the Champlain Inn and there's also a lack of um which is partially related to the lack of funding but there's then also just a lack of staffing um especially as folks become more and more chronically homeless the needs get more and more acute as we're having in our conversation earlier and so the way that we think about sheltering which before a lot there used to be a lot of like volunteerism around that and write and things like that and more and more it's becoming professionalized just as people need training to deal with more acute needs which is related to but not um totally overlapping with the opioid crisis um i just feel like i need a pause there because that was hard um any questions on that with the whole thing oh that i feel like i need to take a pause because that was hard the part just before that about the opioid crisis oh i said which is related i just i there's like there's a mental health problem that's been going on since the pandemic which is one thing and that's affecting a lot of us there's a homelessness crisis that's happening and that has been made worse in vermont um for a variety of reasons and then there's also the opioid crisis and those three there's a thread that runs through them but i also don't want people to think that if you are one you are necessarily all two of the other ones and so i feel like there's been some conflating going on but they're also not unrelated so i don't necessarily uh i don't necessarily have a question but i it's more not directly for you but to everybody in the room and um would people be interested in if we were able to compile a list of things that people would need if people in the room and other people online or in the ward would be willing to donate some things so that we can help with this decrease in volunteerism like if we can be as a ward help with resources for some of these unhoused people and show some some sympathy and grace towards them is that something that people would be interested whether it's food or like i was even thinking like women like could use feminine products and toothbrushes and wet wipes or toilet paper or anything like i i just feel like it's there's a lot of opportunity in this room to help and so i was reaching out to the room to see if people would be interested in that oh i was just gonna say and like this is how the old east end mutual aid is born so uh you know i'm part of the people's kitchen and i'm wearing my people's farm stand shirt so let's talk to that point i mean there you know the kinds of kits that you're talking about uh committee on temporary shelter collects those and hands them out to the folks that they serve cvoeo does i'm not sure we need to reinvent the wheel um there you know there are existing mechanisms like the one um that jake just mentioned and then the non-profits that are providing services that said those folks are understaffed and they can all use volunteers um so folks do find themselves with free time um that is you know i think that all i'll be welcome um you know the cvoeo runs the resource center at the um at the uh at the food shelf um they can use help and just one more comment i just want to make sure that people aren't left with the impression that everyone who is experiencing homelessness is either uh suffering from substance use disorder or mental illness it is absolutely not the case homelessness is um it has many factors but one of the main factors is people don't have housing and our market economy does not uh work for low income people uh people with disabilities and people um who simply don't have the money to afford the outrageous rents that are being charged these days um there are structural issues with the economy um that do not work for low income uh and and low resource people and folks from marginalized communities so it's not just that everybody's got mental illness and everybody's got substance use disorder it's just some of these folks are just poor uh and they cannot afford housing and there is no housing for them to rent because we have one of the lowest vacancy rates for rental housing in the country um and we also as uh as a result have the second highest rate of homelessness uh in this country and again a lot of these folks are folks that are living in their cars or they're living in tents and they're actually going to work every day um and that is really really hard i mean just think about going to work uh when you got no place to brush your teeth you got no place to fresh in your face and get the sleepy sand out of your eyes and you're expected to you know to put in eight hours so that's the situation for a lot of a lot of folks who are experiencing homelessness and i just hope folks remember that it's not like there's a deserving uh group of folks who are homeless and uh and an undeserving group of folks who are homeless um they all have one thing in common they don't have housing and i just want to i that's what i was trying to say and i'm glad that you um read don't double down on on it because i do think it's on a really important point um and i mean i think i'm one of the hardest working people that i know and i was homeless for a while because between college and before like and i had a college degree i had a college degree and i couldn't afford my security deposit and until i and i was going to work every day at a law firm but until i got my first couple of pay checks i didn't have a security deposit so i just didn't get housing and that was in oklahoma which was a low vacancy rate and very low cost of housing and so in burlington and i think that's the other thing is that as we're getting into more and more of a housing crunch anything right a divorce like a anything can mean that you suddenly no longer have housing and there's nothing that anyone can really do about it because there's no alternatives um so thanks erhard erhard i got a question is it better for people who want to volunteer to um do so as individuals and can we provide a list of agencies that they could talk to or would it be better to get someone from those agencies to our next meeting or have a separate meeting so that we can um understand what their needs are and and approach it from that point of view i mean i you know i'm not on the steering committee you guys have a better view of the agenda and what's coming up i'm not talking about agenda i'm talking about the these organizations like yeah i mean if you wanted to have paul dragan from cb oeo come talk or jonathan ferrell from cots you know is it better to bring them here to an i'm sure they'd be willing to come to help um you know provide their perspective to the npa okay jake and i can also help with getting some collective things out i was really just asking bring them here or individuals go there yeah um oh sorry so that was number one um opioids um i don't want to read this um so we all i think we've all read the things um that we've already had more overdose responses overdose deaths all of the statistics that we've had by this time that we've already had this year outweigh what we had last year which outweighs anything that we had the year before um that's really all i have on that um this i'm not actually a hundred percent sure where we are and i didn't apparently pull it on where we are on the over sorry the safe injection sites um which i think might be at this with the state right now do you know if that's true tim i think it's with the state yeah um so i don't think we've gotten any update on that um but that's happening and i don't think it's often i don't think the view is optimistic is my sense is there a it seems like if you went back a couple years ago people would uh in the press a lot of drug addictions were attributed to oxycodone and i don't hear that so much i'm what i'm hearing is uh that there's overdoses because a fentanyl but i'm not sure how people get started i mean has has the way people get started has it really changed or is it unchanged in your opinion over the last three or four years i don't know well i'm not an expert but i i was a federal prosecutor when the situation evolved and you know my first two or three years as a federal prosecutor we didn't have any heroin really to speak of cases it was all oxycodone cases and then at some point i'm forgetting the exact year 2010 we could look it up 2010 2011 the pharmaceutical pharmaceutical companies changed the makeup of oxycodone to make it more difficult to divert to make it more difficult to crush and snort and naively those of us who were were in the field thought that was great news and very soon thereafter um we started to see heroin and vermont um at a level that we hadn't seen since the late 90s there was a heroin boom in vermont in the late 90s nothing like we have now so you know you had opioid addicted folks who were no longer accessing no no longer having diverted percocets and oxycodones available to them and of course without readily available treatment um they turned to heroin um which has since become adulterated with fentanyl and car fentanyl um by the dealers who come up here and profit um from the trade in terms of how any individual person becomes addicted to opioids it's obviously there's as many ways as there are that you can possibly imagine um but certainly there was a time in which the medical community was systemically over prescribing opioids so there was a big shift in the way the medical community viewed and treated pain management um and there's there's lots of stuff to read about that um but but many people in vermont again when i was deeply involved in this would tell you a story about a back injury um a sports injury um a work related injury being prescribed opioids which i think now the medical community recognizes over prescription or inappropriate prescription becoming addicted um that way um but that's certainly not the only way people come become addicted to opioids that's helpful yeah okay but you know even in my short you know my relatively short time in the field the change in the drug trade in vermont was absolutely draconian and um just an it was an extraordinary sea change to watch it happen over a very short period of time okay thanks so as a steering committee person who's asked soraya to do this um i i would be really interested in hearing resources that you all think would be important to have come here to fill us in on what what this crisis means because i know from going to the memorial um two weeks ago that was in city park i mean there was so much that i learned just listening to people's stories um and listening to tanya and listening to morrow and listening to sarah george i mean there are there are leaders who who seem like they they get it um so what is what's the load and is it us are we the ones that need to get more um riveted and more um educated and more on board um and not so punitive um and i think we could really use information that can help us better understand so if you all could help us figure that out i think i think at least at least one one meeting talking about opiod oids and talking about how this how we've come to this place and what we can do because you're hearing from this group that we want to do something right um and i think there is i think we're that quiet middle class white majority that are misunderstanding what the what the story is and we need to use our voices i think in a louder way to move the issue so i think so i i don't feel as educated on like why people um take um opioids in the first place or why um but what i do so i think that the response to like thank goodness like the response to this like drug crisis has been more sympathetic than any that we've had ever before um and so i do think that to some extent we're not prosecuting the same ways we're not doing some of those things so i don't think that there's as much advocacy to be done around that um however i think there's still a lot of um like people i do think that there's a lot to be learned about and i think that this actually goes with what we're talking about earlier around like just understanding like people don't understand the difference between someone who is um overdosing someone who's just in a mental health crisis someone who's just like homeless and has absolutely no issues i think they really get lumped and so i'm not the right person to give that training but i think that getting some valuable training on when you encounter someone um what there may be going through um and what you should do based on that i think would be really helpful as a community and then of course things like um knowing how to um administer Narcan and things like that is helpful if you're going to be doing that as well um i think some of the other things um and then this is because again i know more about like the housing side of things like i do think like the there's and i think that this is like this is a thing that takes time right so i think that some of the folks who do mutual aid like those communities are aware of like these are the folks who are just really struggling and having a hard time like these are the folks who if you catch them on a bad day they're going to be having a bad day and these are the folks who are just always just trying to make it and so i think the more people that we have who are like because ultimately like we just as a city and even as like nonprofits like the need has become so acute but also so broad like there's so many more people than there were who are um experiencing some of these issues um but i do think that having more people who are looking out for more people would be a good thing so that it becomes an individualized response as opposed to a because on a like broad scale it's like how do we suddenly house 700 more people in our county that's a really difficult problem but it's like oh how do we like get 10 more people who we know that they have what they need if they need it and that we're having conversations with them and keeping them accountable that's a little bit easier so that would be my recommendation around what we can do and then also i just think it's and this is i say this to it but i think i think it's a little bit of a moral failing on our city that we are choosing to spend our budget in the exact same way as though these crises aren't happening and we're saying we need state and federal resources i agree with that we can't solve this on the city budget alone but it honestly is a little bit hard for me to care about some of the other stuff when this is happening um in our city and so i do think that there's some advocate to be set around like no we actually do want to spend our money a little bit differently like i actually think that you know maybe some of these things can go for like a little bit until we and so even i was thinking about for the housing just because i'm on the seating art chair and i am part of the housing trust fund it's like i care about affordable housing as much as anybody on the city council and i'm like maybe this is the year where none of it goes to all of the other initiatives and we just air hearts frowning at me and like we just spent all of it on being like if we put the entire to the housing trust fund to one organization to try to do something around homelessness will that put a dent into it not a small dent but still like a dent so i think there's some advocacy to be done around how we spend our money as a city because i think we're doing what we can to get the state and federal funds and then even around like sarah russell like i don't know when her position is going to end like i don't even and we need more coordination not less coordination around this stuff go ahead i would i would also say carol two one you know one thing maybe to think about is to try and you know because these problems are so big and overlapping right so we've pointed out right not everyone who's experiencing homelessness as a mental health is experiencing mental health problem not everyone who's experiencing mental health problem is addicted to opioids not everyone who's addicted to opioids is experiencing houselessness right like so it is you can't lump this all together because that's no path for any solutions um and it is a it is a significant series of structural issues going on you know from an npa's perspective i don't want to tell the npa steering committee how to do it but you know you might want to think about narrowing your focus right and i don't know what that focus should be but you know you might want to choose one thing um and you might you know you know whether it's you know lee morgan was talking about her initiative in uh and in working in the parks to clean up needles that's not a solution to anything except needles in our parks right but it's not that and so nobody's pretending like that's going to solve any of these problems but it doesn't make it a worth it doesn't make it a a task that's not worth doing um so just a thought not particularly so if if we chose one thing one of the things i'd like us to consider is what do we do when we encounter somebody who's in real need and how do we get educated on what kind of resources there are how to use narcan make that available those kinds of things so that um you know there were some people hiding in the bushes between my house and chris and sherry's house i know that peter and sheryl know and they i went went over to talk with them and they said we just need a place that's safe and they were clearly wanting they said we're just sitting down to talk but they clearly needed a place to stay for the night and not knowing anything else because i don't know much about this i suggested they because i didn't want to go far i suggested they go into centennial woods but they were worried about their safety and they wanted to get some rest and they wanted to be away from um from drugs although they probably had been using but they just needed to be safe and i i really didn't i felt inadequate in how to to get them safe and i will say that's not i'm sorry and also i feel like the city staff feel the same way because they also don't have literally they don't have anywhere to tell people to go to be safe um which is a hard place to be in for anyone well maybe this is what we talk about at our next meeting i mean one of our general and jenna agenda items is to say what are we going to talk about at our next meeting and bring someone in to say what can we do how can we get trained and i mean what can we do as a group and what can we do as individuals when we encounter various people in various states i think you know me and lacy and feride could probably answer like i feel like i could answer in very very detailed like best practice like because i'm also an emt like i and feride is like mr mutual aid he started people's kitchen back in 2010 um and he cooks and he sent me here with a message for the steering committee that he would like to cook for ward one um and so we can bring the food element of the mutual aid and lacy is uh the original csl and one of my good friends um so yeah i'll just offer that to you guys yeah and that's the last uh community support liaison but back you know she was doing it for like seven years before there were others and she's also the sorry predecessor of sarah russell and the last thing they'll say around that is i do think that there's like there's a vert like if if you aren't comfortable like right there's a level of there's different levels of comfort and i think there's tasks for everyone regardless of their level of comfort i'll leave it there you know you know one of one of the thing people can do is speak out in favor of more housing um it's very simple um you know there's sarah i was mentioning um you know some of the rezoning that's going to be going on uh don't oppose it um you know speak for it um because part of what kills housing is nimbyism and um you know a lot of us um you know kind of have the impulse of we don't like development we don't want more housing um don't be that way um say yes to housing or i don't want this i feel like when the new place came up or when elm would happen people were like i'm supportive of this i just don't want it here so and another piece to the to the housing issue is uh keeping from uh uvm's student population in control so uvm has got to take care of the people that they enroll and uh what they're doing is saying well we're going to house them for two years that means way more every additional freshman that they bring in is an additional junior and senior that's going to be looking for housing off campus and that's that's killing our housing and despite saying for years that there's no additional students right here they are yeah which isn't to say we don't want students we just want them housed safely are you going to talk about what's going on in south berlington i i think you know it's it's worth mentioning that mention it please there's the university vermont is building the university vermont is building um hundreds of units i can't remember the exact number i think it's maybe 400 um don't quote me on that um ultimately in uh in the new city center um over in in south berlington and it's you know it's going to be uh designated for um for for graduate students and as well as um upper upper class students so i think that it's it's a phase development it's going to happen over several years um but it's uh i think it's good news the problem is that they may also increase as i think we know enrollment at the same time yeah it seems like it seems like the question to ask is what does that do to our vacancy rates you know it's a it's great it's good news but what does it do to the vacancy rates and it may do it may be a little bit out close to the end of our meeting so uh is there something else i think tim had one point around that and then i'll close out well i did want to mention and i asked zaria because i'm still new to these executive session rules um we did zaria and i and hannah king did meet with and caron paul met in august with uvm and got an update on the continuing negotiations with respect to new uvm housing and the zoning issue um that is still part of this executive session you know bargaining but but you should know that there is continued discussion and uh and we're a part of it you're sorry about the training to campus discussion yes okay and the mou discussion the mou discussion okay and i'm sorry we can't provide you details yet but great stuff stuff's happening and then just my last final point is on police response um which isn't just i guess not police response additional responses alternative responses so i guess police response up from the low of 62 officers to 67 officers we have um in the police department eight additional positions so as jake was mentioning we have four additional community service liaisons and five community service officers um and then on the park side we have the urban park rangers which neil is the head of what's going on with is it cuts or cuts or cuts the the response team that's supposed to be part of oh i'm not a hundred percent sure what the cahoots no it's yeah it was cahoots and ours is cares yes started as cahoots though yes started as cahoots um in another city and we're calling ours cares and it's moving forward we had the rfp i'm not a hundred percent sure actually i need to get an update on that where that's been last so the last thing that we had was that we didn't fully have the funding for it we had a four thousand dollar gap um that we were trying to get funding for but we did move forward with hiring for the like monitor for that position or at least with posting for that i don't know what's happened since then so i can get short term rentals and cares updates so your piece was uh public safety so the perception that i have anyway is that the police just don't care about um uh items of uh public safety that don't have to do with the topics that you've mentioned or anything with guns so would you like there's there's no traffic enforcement for instance the institution lead there's no traffic enforcement um we are told that if there's um burglary's or um property theft that that's not important probably because it wouldn't be prosecuted anyway when are we going to get our arms around that and um have a proper uh police force again or is there going to be a time when the the uh chitenden county for for want of a better word takes responsibility for some of the things that um are happening in burlington that are fostered in other parts of the county or other parts of the state so why why when is burlington going to stop paying the bill effectively for uh some of the things that you've talked about which um are all exceptionally important yeah so the traffic decision was of course pre anything pre-covid so the reducing the enforcement of traffic was a decision that was made long before i was on the council um and um at the so that was at the height of kind of the police force so i think that's unrelated to um i think that was a policy decision um was it the right one i we have three minutes left so i won't go too deeply into that and then i addressed it last time and i i wrote to you in ten with details of uh a thread with various police officers and i didn't get a response so that's why i'm asking yeah and yeah so i don't i don't think that i yeah i think that that was a decision that was made i don't think that this is probably when we're going to revisit that decision um the burglary things the official stance of the police department is still to report everything that happens um by email or to them yes if we get burglared correct by email though that's so ridiculous well i i have just a general question and i i don't really expect an answer but i want to ask it anyhow and that's in your opinion are the police uh given their headcount are they uh deployed effectively and are they doing a good job given their headcount um so i think that this is like bigger i i'm trying not to get politic i think that the um i think that there's been a lot of choices not necessarily on the parts of individual officers that continue to make the job a little harder than it needs to be and i don't know and i think that is a lot around morale like i think the morale of the police department is still really low i think we're still getting more officers um but i also think it doesn't make it i think it makes it harder than it's to be both on the officer side but i also think it makes it less effective than you would hope it to be on the community side that is as okay not an answer of an answer as i can possibly give but well i do appreciate that um we're at the end of our meeting but we did have uh one thing we wanted it to answer the answer to these questions i wasn't asked did you want to say something okay i'm way behind saraya i think what i'm walking away with is that there's a couple things that we want to bring up for our next meeting um more about uh public safety and also the things that ailes causes um homelessness and drug addiction and how we can help so uh i think as a steering committee we're going to talk about that and how to npa in on further discussions well and i'm hearing an interest in the neighborhood zoning and also about more about bed and the district heating am i hearing that as well okay all right as long as the steering committee is talking and we would welcome anybody who wants to be on the steering committee to join us it's a great place to strategize make conversation talk with people have snacks so so there's a lot of obviously there's a lot of work to do and if there's anybody else who wants to participate we'd welcome people to join the steering committee i just also want to give a big thank you to the steering committee to all the video support and also to saraya and tim um you know this is the kind of conversation that is rich and so important and the assignment for the next npa is bring a friend who's never come to npa okay all right so with that we're gonna everybody can stand up we're gonna officially conclude our meeting